These numbers come directly from official US government websites and can easily be verified. For a long time the national debt was stuck at just less than $16.7 trillion because of the debt ceiling fight, but now that the debt ceiling crisis has been delayed for a few months the national debt is soaring once again.

In fact, just one day after the deal in Congress was reached, the US national debt rose by an astounding $328 billion. In the blink of an eye we shattered the $17 trillion mark with no end in sight. We are stealing about $100,000,000 from our children and our grandchildren every single hour of every single day. This goes on 24 hours a day, month after month, year after year without any interruption.

Over the past five years, the US government has been on the greatest debt binge in history. Unfortunately, most Americans don't realize just how bad things have gotten because the true budget deficit numbers are not reported on the news. The following is where the US national debt has been on September 30th during the five years previous to this one...

09/30/2012: $16,066,241,407,385.89

09/30/2011: $14,790,340,328,557.15

09/30/2010: $13,561,623,030,891.79

09/30/2009: $11,909,829,003,511.75

09/30/2008: $10,024,724,896,912.49

The George Cross was introduced by King George VI at the height of the Blitz to recognise “acts of the greatest heroism or of the most conspicuous courage in circumstances of extreme danger”. It has been awarded to just two groups: the island of Malta, in recognition of its bombardment in World War Two; and the Royal Ulster Constabulary, which lost 300 officers during the Troubles.

Oliver Colvile, the Conservative MP for Plymouth Sutton and Devonport, said the Rock had been under siege fourteen times since it was secured by Britain under the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, and its people have remained loyal to the Crown since. The peninsula, a British naval base used to resupply ships and submarines, was crucial during the Battle of Trafalgar, the Gulf War and the Falklands crisis, he said.

An astonishing new book by François Heisbourg – La Fin du Rêve Européen (The End of the European Dream) – argues that the "euro cancer" must be cut out to save the rest of the EU Project before it is too late. "The dream has given way to nightmare. We must face the reality that the EU itself is now threatened by the euro. The current efforts to save it are endangering the Union yet further," he writes:

There is nothing worse than having to confront the sunless mornings (matins blêmes) of an endless crisis, but we are not going to avoid it by denying the reality, and God knows denial has been for a long time, by default, the operating mode of those in charge of EU institutions.

At some time in the future, the author insists, Europe's leaders should relaunch the euro, but only after they have established the necessary federalist foundations, and only among a vanguard willing to accept the full implications of a federal currency.

Bet on Europe's recovery if you want, but remember one thing. The North-South gap at the root of EMU's troubles will be not closed by a return to tolerable growth – far from assured – because it will also bring forward the day when Germany demands interest rate rises. The crisis changes shape. It does not go away. Monetary union remains dysfunctional with growth or without growth.

And there were plenty of other noises: muffled thuds and bumps and scrapes as the boat knocked against pieces of debris. What was missing was the cries of the seabirds which, on all previous similar voyages, had surrounded the boat. The birds were missing because the fish were missing.

Exactly 10 years before, when Newcastle yachtsman Ivan Macfadyen had sailed exactly the same course from Melbourne to Osaka, all he'd had to do to catch a fish from the ocean between Brisbane and Japan was throw out a baited line. "There was not one of the 28 days on that portion of the trip when we didn't catch a good-sized fish to cook up and eat with some rice," Macfadyen recalled. But this time, on that whole long leg of sea journey, the total catch was two. No fish. No birds. Hardly a sign of life at all. "I've done a lot of miles on the ocean in my life and I'm used to seeing turtles, dolphins, sharks and big flurries of feeding birds. But this time, for 3,000 nautical miles there was nothing alive to be seen."

In place of the missing life was garbage in astounding volumes. "Part of it was the aftermath of the tsunami that hit Japan a couple of years ago. The wave came in over the land, picked up an unbelievable load of stuff and carried it out to sea. And it's still out there, everywhere you look."

"On the bow, in the waters above Hawaii, you could see right down into the depths. I could see that the debris isn't just on the surface, it's all the way down. And it's all sizes, from a soft-drink bottle to pieces the size of a big car or truck. "We saw a factory chimney sticking out of the water, with some kind of boiler thing still attached below the surface. We saw a big container-type thing, just rolling over and over on the waves.

Back in Newcastle, Ivan Macfadyen is still coming to terms with the shock and horror of the voyage. "The ocean is broken," he said, shaking his head in stunned disbelief.

At the beginning of her third term, Merkel has more power in Germany and Europe than any chancellor before her. There hasn't been such a strong majority behind a government in Germany's parliament, the Bundestag, since the first grand coalition half a century ago. In the midst of the European crisis, Germany has become the undisputed dominant power in Europe.

Officials at the Chancellery are forging plans for Europe that are practically visionary for someone like Merkel. If she prevails, they will fundamentally change the European Union. The goal is to achieve extensive, communal control of national budgets, of public borrowing in the 28 EU capitals and of national plans to boost competitiveness and implement social reforms. The hope is that these measures will ensure the long-term stability of the euro and steer member states onto a common economic and fiscal path. This would be the oft-invoked and ambitious political completion of Europe's monetary union - a huge achievement.

It isn't a new goal, but what is new is the thumbscrews Brussels will be allowed to apply if Merkel has her way, including sooner and sharper controls and veto rights, as well as contractually binding agreements and requirements. In short, this would amount to a true reconstruction of the euro zone and a major step in the direction of an "economic government" of the sort the SPD too would like to see put in place.

Scenarios to this effect formed the basis of an informational training exercise for the military's future commanders that ended last week. The large-scale manoeuvre, which involved a total of 3,500 soldiers and 700 ground and aerial vehicles - carried out in the close vicinity of the former Nazi Bergen-Belsen concentration camp - also exercised combat against insurgents in congested urban areas.

Various surveillance drones and elite units specialized in "covert operations" as well as those specialized in psychological warfare were also in action. They trained using live ammunition. According to the German military, the exercise took the "reality" of past warfare into consideration, while anticipating "foreseeable challenges of the future."

Since August 1971, when US President Richard Nixon unilaterally tore up the Bretton Woods Treaty of 1944 and told the world that the Federal Reserve ‘gold window’ was permanently closed, Wall Street banks and US and City of London financial powers have done everything imaginable to prevent gold from again becoming the basis of trust in a currency.

On Friday, October 11, when there was no sign of any deal between US Congress members and the Obama White House that would end the government shutdown, the Chicago CME Group, which operates Comex - the Chicago Commodity Exchange, where contracts in gold derivatives are traded - announced that at 8:42am Eastern time the trading was halted for 10 seconds after a safety mechanism was triggered because a 2-million-ounce (56.7 million grams) gold futures sell order was executed.

UBS gold trader Art Cashin echoed the suspicion. “…if that happens once it could be an accident of technology, or it could be a simple error. But when it happens five times over a period of months, it does raise questions. Is it being done purposefully? Is somebody trying to influence the market?”

That ‘someone’ market sources believe is the Obama White House, in league with the Federal Reserve and key Wall Street banks that would be ruined were gold to really rise.

Pope Francis, who has called for the Roman Catholic Church to be “poor and for the poor”, intervened in response to appeals by German congregations concerned at alleged mishandling of funds by Church institutions.

Only the Pope has the authority to remove a bishop, who, according to church law, cannot normally resign or be dismissed. The 53-year-old bishop, Germany’s youngest at the time of his appointment, was reported to have flown to Rome last week on a budget airline. The furore in Germany over the bishop’s reported extravagance is being seen in the Vatican as a test of the Argentine pontiff’s resolve to bring more transparency and frugality to the Church.

The controversy has enraged the Catholic community in a country where a church tax and state direct funding bring billions of euros a year to the German Church – the country’s second largest employer after the state.

"The question is not tapering. The question is at what point will they increase the asset purchases to say $150 [billion], $200 [billion], a trillion dollars a month," Faber said in a "Squawk Box" interview. The Fed-which is currently buying $85 billion worth of bonds every month - will hold its October meeting next week to deliberate the future of its asset purchases known as quantitative easing.

Faber has been predicting so-called "QE infinity" because "every government program that is introduced under urgency and as a temporary measure is always permanent." He also said, "The Fed has boxed itself into a position where there is no exit strategy."

While there may be little inflation in the US, Faber said there's been incredible asset inflation. "We are the bubble. We have a colossal asset bubble in the world [and] a leverage or a debt bubble." Back in April 2012, Faber said the world will face "massive wealth destruction" in which "well to-do people will lose up to 50 percent of their total wealth."

"One day this asset inflation will lead to a deflationary collapse one way or the other. We don't know yet what will cause it," he said.

"We need to agree on common values for all religions as soon as possible, a kind of secular Ten Commandments on which we will build the world of tomorrow," he said in an opening speech kicking off the three-day summit.

Walesa won the Nobel 30 years ago for leading Poland's Solidarity trade union, which negotiated a peaceful end to communism in Poland in 1989. Besides universal values, the international community needs to focus on the economy of tomorrow, he said. "That's definitely neither communism nor capitalism as we have it today," said the former shipyard electrician, who became Poland's first post-war democratic president.

The 4.3m (14ft) dead snake-like fish was found in the city of Oceanside - five days after another and larger specimen (5.5m) had been found. Reports on social media recall an ancient Japanese myth linking extremely rare oarfish sightings to tremors.

But scientists remain sceptical of any link to increased tectonic activity. They remain puzzled, however, by the two discoveries of this rare deepwater fish near the beach. The larger specimen, found on Santa Catalina island, has now been dissected and it appears well-fed, healthy and with little sign of disease.

Now, Belgians want to allow euthanasia for children.

Under legislation currently being debated in the Belgian Parliament, terminally ill or suffering children under 18 could be euthanized if they request it, their parents consent to it, and an expert deems the child capable of understanding their decision. The bill is widely supported and is expected to become law. Supporters of Belgium's proposed euthanasia law say it is necessary and compassionate, but critics say it is only the next phase in what they call "a culture of death." Euthanasia is now considered medical therapy in Belgium.

Michel De Keukelaere, a law student and the founder of the March for Life in Brussels, views it as "...really a symbolic law. It's sort of the revenge of these socialist and liberal parties who want to show that Christianity in Belgium is finished." What the law will almost assuredly do is make the practice of killing suffering children more common. Some Belgian doctors are already killing newborns with spina bifida at the parents' request.

A long statement from the Wikimedia Foundation, the charitable organisation that oversees the sixth largest site on the web, revealed that some 250 sock puppets have been "blocked or banned" after being found to have carried out "non-neutral editing" of Wikipedia pages.

Wikipedia, which has grown to more than 30 million articles (with more than 4 million in the English language edition) since it was founded in 2001, uses a team of some 250,000 volunteer editors to protect the authenticity of its content.

But in the statement, Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, acknowledged that it had been the victim of concerted activity in falsifying pages for commercial and other motives. "It looks like a number of user accounts - perhaps as many as several hundred - may have been paid to write articles on Wikipedia promoting organizations or products," she said, "and have been violating numerous site policies and guidelines, including prohibitions against sock puppetry and undisclosed conflicts of interest".

He told the BBC that he had not seen another situation in Washington where "compromise" seemed so far away. Mr Greenspan confessed to sympathies with the aims of the Tea Party, the Republican faction that fought the government during debt ceiling talks. But the former central banker said the movement's tactics were "undemocratic".

Mr Greenspan, the most powerful figure in economic policy when he ran the Fed between 1987 to 2006, spoke to the BBC's Evan Davis ahead of publication of his new book, The Map and the Territory. In a wide-ranging interview to be broadcast on Radio 4's Today programme and the World Service's Business Daily, the former Fed chief had strong words for those who thought the eurozone crisis was over.

The crisis is likely to continue until the eurozone sees "consolidation politically. I think that's where we are going". He said: "The culture of Greece is not the same as the culture of Germany, and to fuse them into a single unit is extremely difficult. The only way you can do it is by political union, like with East and West Germany, and even that is not working as well as it should be."

We’re already at war in numerous countries all over the world. But top economic advisers warn that economic factors could lead to a new world war.

Kyle Bass writes:

Trillions of dollars of debts will be restructured and millions of financially prudent savers will lose large percentages of their real purchasing power at exactly the wrong time in their lives. Again, the world will not end, but the social fabric of the profligate nations will be stretched and in some cases torn. Sadly, looking back through economic history, all too often war is the manifestation of simple economic entropy played to its logical conclusion. We believe that war is an inevitable consequence of the current global economic situation.

We’re in the middle of a global currency war – ie a situation where nations all compete to devalue their currencies the most in order to boost exports. And Brazilian president-elect Rousseff said in 2010: The last time there was a series of competitive devaluations … it ended in world war two.